


Every Day Above Ground

by lustmordred



Category: Person of Interest (TV)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-10-15
Updated: 2013-10-15
Packaged: 2017-12-29 12:53:40
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,707
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1005690
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lustmordred/pseuds/lustmordred
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Most days, they were 30 seconds away from a near death experience at any given moment. According to Harold, that meant that in a single day they narrowly avoided death 2,880 times.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Every Day Above Ground

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Portrait_of_a_Fool](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Portrait_of_a_Fool/gifts).



> I wrote this for [Portrait_of_a_Fool](http://archiveofourown.org/users/Portrait_of_a_Fool/)'s birthday, which was on the 13th. This is sort of like an episode of Seinfeld in that it's character-driven more than plot-driven. It's like a character study with illusions of grandeur. Hopefully she isn't the only one who likes it, though.

Nothing is worth more than this day.  
 _Johann Wolfgang von Goethe_

 

Most days, they were 30 seconds away from a near death experience at any given moment. According to Harold, that meant that in a single day they narrowly avoided death 2,880 times. John didn’t think that sounded right at all, but if he said so, Harold would just counter by demonstrating on the board in the library the accuracy of his math, and the last time he had done that, he had concluded by saying the odds had doubled since they had taken in Shaw. So, on an average day when the machine was spitting out numbers, it was now possible for them to die 5,760 times, according to Harold. 

Shaw, if she was there, would scoff dismissively and point out the number of times she had saved both of their asses. Harold would scowl at her in a way that made his eyes look small and squinty, hating her for being right the way math teachers hated students for not showing their work. 

Then there were days, like yesterday, when no numbers came at all. Days when the phone did not ring. Whole days when no one was planning to kill anybody. They didn’t always fall on a Sunday, but John thought of them as days of rest. They were rare and blessed. Numberless days were days for sleeping in, for reading a book, for hot breakfast cooked on the stove at home rather than cold doughnuts stacked in a box to be eaten quickly on the run. On numberless days, John sometimes took Bear to the park. If Bear was with Harold, sometimes he played checkers with Hon. Sometimes, not often, but sometimes, Harold would have dinner with him and they would go to the movies or the theater. Too many numberless days would have set him adrift and made him restless, but every so often, even they needed a day off. 

It was the days without numbers that Harold usually stayed over. He would almost always sneak out before morning and John would wake up alone with the sheet beside him cold to the touch wondering again how it had happened. Not sex with Harold; he knew exactly how that happened, but he wasn’t a deep sleeper and it wasn’t the easiest thing in the world to sneak out of his bed without him noticing. 

Harold was a very private person, he would think, and he had to admire the man’s determination. And his skill. Harold could slam up roadblocks faster than anyone John had ever met. He could construct emotional walls of ice faster, better and more impervious than any trained assassin, and he could do it while still laying naked in John’s bed before the sweat had even dried on his skin. 

Oh, the things the CIA could have learned from Harold Finch. 

John had one hand over the side of the bed and Bear licked his fingers. He petted the dog’s head with one hand and reached across the bed to run his other hand over the empty space beside him. There was a cordless phone on the nightstand on that side of the bed. He picked it up and called Harold. 

It was answered on the second ring. “Good morning, Mr. Reese.”

 _Mr. Reese,_ just like Harold hadn’t had his tongue in his mouth the night before. Just like it had never happened, though it happened pretty regularly. But that little bit of distance, that at-arm’s-length formality, wasn’t even about sex. It was about proving that he didn’t care for him the way they both knew he cared for him. Sometimes Harold was so good at it, he could still make John believe it, but not today. 

“Good morning, Harold.”

Harold didn’t say anything for a beat and John smiled to himself while he waited. Finally, he cleared his throat and said, “Yes, well, we have another number. I’ve already contacted Miss Shaw. I’ll see you in a few minutes, Mr. Reese?”

“Sure, Harold,” John said. He had to take a shower and strip the sheets and make the bed first, but he didn’t say so aloud. Harold was quiet on the other end of the phone and John could imagine the wide-eyed and anxious expression on his face with perfect clarity. “I notice you didn’t take Bear with you. Did you feed him before you left?”

“Yes, Mr. Reese,” Harold said. His voice had dropped a little and gained a touch of cautionary urgency. “Miss Shaw has just arrived.”

 _Hint, hint._ John grinned and thought about saying something just to embarrass him. Harold always talked with the phone on the speaker. Then he decided against it. “I’ll be there in a few minutes,” he said. He hung up the phone and got out of bed. 

Bear hopped up onto the bed to wriggle around in the place he had just vacated, making himself comfortable in the heat where John had been sleeping. He had a new rawhide bone and he gripped it between his paws and began to gnaw on it while he watched John cross the apartment to the bathroom. 

John wondered idly what Bear must think of what he and Harold got up to when Harold stayed over. He decided that, from the dog’s perspective, it was probably all a little bit ridiculous.

††††††††

It used to be that a good day was one spent writing code that went somewhere, code that would become the building blocks of something. Good code was the foundation of creation and on a good day, Harold would sit back, proud and pleased with himself, feeling like God. On a really good day, God would make a lot of money.

It wasn’t until much later that he realized that the really best days were the days he couldn’t even remember. When he’d done something that mattered, sure, but sometimes the very best days were the days when he didn’t accomplish anything important at all. They were days when he was building the machine, creating it out of the ether of his own genius, playing with it until he got it just right. But they were also days spent walking in the park with Grace. He could never remember if they were Mondays or Tuesdays or what, but he could remember the moments that mattered. When the wind would catch her hair and it would spark like fire as it fluttered before she tucked it behind her ear. Or he did it for her. 

Before Grace, there was Nathan, but that was a long time ago and it hurt. Nathan, who knew a long time before Harold did that _people_ were as important as _the people_. He had been stronger than Harold gave him credit for in the end, and he would always remember that last glimpse of him there by the water, smiling and calling out for him just before the ferry exploded. It was funny how memories like that could hurt like hell and still be counted among the very best. 

For John, it was probably the same. His good days used to be about Jessica, then about not getting shot or not having to shoot anyone, then that was gone and so was Jessica and he was just waiting for someone to take pity on him and kill him. He wouldn’t lay down and just die, that wasn’t John Reese’s style, but he hoped someone would catch him having a really bad day, a day when he was too drunk to put up much fight or too tired, and put him down. He thought he deserved it. Now he was back to counting his good days among the days when he wasn’t shot. 

Those were always good days in Harold’s book, too. 

It was really ironic the way things had turned out with John. In the beginning, Harold foolishly thought it would be _easy_. He knew about John, knew John needed to be saved as much as he needed someone like John to help him save others. He knew about him, but he didn’t _know_ him, so he thought it would be so simple. He would just hire him to do what Harold himself couldn’t do, for his skills as a killer and a liar and a spy, and he would do it because he wasn’t heartless and more than anything he needed a purpose. More than anything in the world, he wanted redemption. Easy. What Harold hadn’t counted on was _John_. The human element. It was always the thing that eluded his understanding, the thing he never anticipated because he just never really thought about people. Ironic. Nathan would have laughed and told him he should have known better and he would have been right. 

Now Harold counted days when John didn’t get shot or set on fire as good days. Days when nobody died, those were good days, too. Then there were the days when nobody shot at anybody and nobody tried to kill anyone, those were the best days. He didn’t remember which days they were, Mondays or Tuesdays or Fridays, it didn’t matter, but they were the best. Before Nathan died, if anyone had told him that he would one day come to love the dark days, the bad days when he or John almost died, the days gone by when they had both lost people, he would not have believed them. He would have thought they were lying. Not anymore. He counted the good days as precious and felt more alive because they were snatched from the darkness. 

Every time John did something noble or brave or stupid and almost got himself killed, Harold’s heart would race, his hands would tremble, his voice would become strained, and he would have liked to be able to blame John for all of that since he was the one putting himself in danger, but he couldn’t. Harold had put John in every deadly position he found himself in since meeting him because he had been the one who found him and he hadn’t had the heart to put him down. But John wasn’t a pet, not even a badly socialized one. He did what Harold told him to or asked him to, but only as long as he felt like it. He didn’t do anything he didn’t _want_ to do and that included Harold.

It would have been easy to assume that John’s affection for him had slipped over into desire for him out of gratitude. He knew that was how it would have looked to anybody else. Harold was always in his ear, always giving him directions and orders and information, and from the outside looking in, it looked a lot like a puppet show. Harold was the puppet master and every time he pushed John back to regain the distance he had lost to him it looked like he was reminding him of that. Except it wasn’t like that at all. He wasn’t entirely sure that John knew that, but that wasn’t why he did it. Harold was quickly learning that humans, himself included, were never really that simple. 

John would have kept his secrets. If anyone could keep them as good as Harold kept them, it was John. It wasn’t a matter of trust, it was survival. If he stopped pushing him back, if he stopped protecting himself and keeping his secrets, if he stayed right through the night and didn’t creep out after John was sleeping, if he took John home with him some night, then might he not one day find himself unable to send John where he needed to be? To protect him, might he not try to keep him from the fray, which was precisely where he was most needed? He had done that with Grace, but Grace was not John Reese. For four whole years, Grace had been Harold’s world, but the hard, cold truth was, the world did not need her. Harold had come to believe that the world could not stand to lose _him_. 

That wasn’t all of it though. If Harold tried to stop John now or keep him away from the action to protect him, John wouldn’t stand for it. In his quiet, indomitable way, he would do what he wanted and let Harold pretend it had been his idea all along. Then one day, maybe not even that far away, what they were doing was going to get one or both of them killed. If it was John, it would be Harold’s fault and nothing would ever convince him that it wasn’t. If he didn’t keep that distance between them, like Nathan, John would break his heart. 

He knew that if he told John his reasons, John would not argue with him about it. John sometimes asked questions and stuck his nose in where it didn’t belong, but he didn’t push back when Harold pushed him away. John might even smile in that lazy, amused way he had that Harold always found so patronizing. Thinking his own thoughts, pleased like the cat who got the cream. Little, subtle things like that because John, Harold suspected, already knew all his reasons. He just liked playing the game. 

A pink pastry box plopped down on the desk beside him and Harold jumped. 

“So, who’s the new number?” John asked, already studying the board where Harold had taped photographs of the number, and the people who might possibly mean her harm. “Where’s Shaw?”

“Right here,” Shaw said, walking out from behind a bookshelf. “Are those doughnuts?”

“Turnovers,” John said. Bear was sniffing at them hopefully. 

“Oh, my god, I love you so hard right now.” Shaw walked over, flipped open the box right on Bear’s nose and took out a cherry turnover. She took a large bite and made a low sound of pleasure in her throat as she chewed. 

Harold stood up and walked over to the board. “This is Mrs. Humphrey. Felicity Humphrey. I can’t be one hundred percent positive, of course, but from what I’ve found out looking at their finances, I believe her husband means to collect on her life insurance.”

“Really?” John asked. 

“That’s not even that interesting,” Shaw said. She licked sugar glaze off her fingertips. “What do you mean, ‘really’?”

“We actually don’t get as many of those as you’d think,” John said. 

“Still, why am I here if it’s just some insurance thing? John can’t take care of that by himself?”

“Well, to quote the old adage, two heads _are_ better than one,” Harold said. When she just stared at him, he sighed. “I thought you might like to practice your people skills.”

“You’re trying to keep me occupied,” Shaw said. 

“And domesticated,” John said. He ignored the annoyed look Harold gave him and smiled. “He does that.”

“I thought you came to us because you wanted to be occupied,” Harold said. 

“I wanted a _hobby,_ ” Shaw corrected. “It’s also pretty handy when people out there want you dead if you know somebody who can find out about it ahead of time. Or some _thing_.” She ate the last bite of her turnover and turned to leave. “You coming?” she called back to John.

“This shouldn’t take long,” John told Harold. “If it really _is_ an insurance thing.”

Harold eyed him over the top of his glasses with lifted brows. “Your point is what, Mr. Reese?”

John’s lips quirked as he suppressed a smile. “I’ll see you later, Harold.”

He walked away and Harold watched him go. “We’ll see,” he muttered. 

When John had closed the gate and disappeared on the other side of it down the stairs, Harold turned back to his computers and frowned at the monitors. He was almost certain it was a life insurance scam. Almost. But sometimes he did all the research and was sure he knew the answer and the truth surprised him anyway. Human nature was impossible to quantify. When that happened, it usually ended up biting John in the ass. Harold really wanted to cross off today on the calendar as another good day where John didn’t get shot, stabbed, set on fire or blown up, so he started going through Felicity Humphrey’s information again. Checking and double checking.

††††††††

In retrospect, that first time shouldn’t have come as such a surprise to either of them. Death was a heady aphrodisiac, probably the only one with any foundation in reality. French lords and ladies did it after watching heads roll at the guillotine. Ancient Romans got off watching the gladiatorial matches. Modern men and women still excused themselves from wakes and after funeral gatherings for some anonymous fornication in a guest room before rejoining the party. It was such a well-known phenomenon that it was a cliché, and the punch line of more than a couple jokes.

The number that had almost killed John was 7240. 

Harold even started to put the number in, 724... and he stopped. There was no reason why, just a _feeling_. He played the moment over and over in his mind a thousand times after it was over, after they were both safe and away from the roof of that building. He still didn’t know why he hadn’t typed in the zero and had instead erased it and put in another number. 3095, the number that saved them both. He tried to tell John about it later, but John shrugged it off. Said it was just one of those things. Even humans still got those instinctive warnings their ancestors used to rely so heavily on in the wild. He didn’t really care why Harold hadn’t finished putting in the wrong number, only that he hadn’t. Harold had to resign himself to the idea that he probably would never know why. 

John drove them back to his place without offering to give Harold a ride home. He would have refused it anyway, but he could have taken a cab. He didn’t and when John parked the car, Harold got out and walked with him to his building. 

After being locked up in prison, then run around the city like a rat in a maze with a bomb vest stuck to him, John wanted a shower in his own bathroom more than anything. That and a minute alone to get control of himself and get his hands to stop shaking.

“I’ll just use your phone to call a cab,” Harold said. 

John turned his head to look at him and blinked, trying to clear his head. There was a lot of white noise up there. “If you want to,” he said. 

“Do you want me to stay, Mr. Reese?” Harold asked. John really didn’t look so great. He was still pasty looking, a little sick, and even though he tried to hide it, Harold could see he was lightly shivering. 

“I’d like that,” John said. He ran one of his shaking hands through his hair. “I’d rather not be alone right now,” he confessed. “Just give me a minute.”

John stayed in the shower for a long time, almost half an hour. Harold sat on the couch listening to the water run and stared out the windows while he waited. It was dark still, though the sun would be rising soon. He could see his own reflection in the window glass like it was the surface of a mirror and he was surprised by how wide-eyed and afraid he looked. 

“It was a traumatic experience,” Harold told his reflection. “I’m allowed to be traumatized.”

John’s soft laughter startled him and Harold jerked around. He was standing by the wall just behind him, his hair still wet and slick on his head like the pelt of a seal. “Are you?” John asked. “Are you _traumatized_ , Harold?”

Harold rubbed his hands over the thighs of his pants and frowned down at the floor. “I don’t think so, no.”

John nodded and went into the kitchen to pour them each a drink. Harold got up and followed him, then stood by the counter and watched. John hadn’t put a shirt on and there were bruises all over his back and down his sides. There were scars that stood out white against his tanned skin and Harold only knew the origins of a few of them. 

John’s hands were steady when he passed a glass over the counter to Harold and picked up his own. Harold was nervous and that made John curious. Harold didn’t usually drink much, but he gulped the scotch down like it was water. Then he gasped and gave the glass back to John. 

“You want another one?” John asked. 

Harold shook his head. “I shouldn’t.”

John finished his own drink and refilled the glass. 

Harold watched him drink it and said, “Mr. Reese, I don’t know if getting drunk right now is the wisest thing--”

“I’m not getting drunk,” John said. 

“I understand if you want to, of course, but the--”

“Harold,” John said. 

Harold stopped talking and nudged his own glass for John to refill it. John did and they stood there across the counter from each other sipping their drinks, watching each other. When they were done, John put the glasses in the sink. When he turned back around, he walked around the counter toward Harold and it was only when he was almost upon him that Harold realized something unexpected was about to happen. He took a step in retreat before he understood that John intended to kiss him rather than hurt him and made himself stop. 

John saw him back up and smiled in an amused way, but he still moved like he was stalking him and Harold put his hands up automatically when he entered his personal space. Instead of trying to defend himself though, which would have been laughably useless anyway, he just rested his hands on John’s arms and stared up at him. 

“You’re really tall,” Harold observed. 

John smiled and relaxed slightly, some of the tension leaving his body when Harold didn’t run screaming for the door. He wasn’t completely sure about what he was doing. He was pretty sure about Harold, but pretty sure still left room for a margin of error. If Harold did decide that screaming and running for the exit was the best course of action, things were probably going to get awkward really fast. If he didn’t, things were likely still going to be awkward, but it would happen at a slower, more manageable pace. 

Then John kissed him and Harold didn’t run away. He made a startled little squeak of a sound when John did it and it took him a moment to respond, but he finally did. It was clumsy and yes, it was awkward, and it wasn’t the best kiss either of them had ever had, but it wasn’t bad. As first kisses went, it was good. It was nice and worth giving it a second chance. And a third. And the third one was really excellent. They stopped counting after the third one and stopped thinking about it too much after the fifth or sixth one.

In the bed, Harold expected John to fumble and hesitate and even need a little bit of coaching and direction, but John surprised him. The only thing he needed a lot of Harold’s help figuring out was how to do it without hurting him. They ended up with Harold on his back, with John being a lot more gentle than he really had to be. Harold ran his fingers over every scar he could reach, amazed that with all of those injuries John could still be alive, at how alive he really was. John kissed him and helped him to move and laughed softly in his ear when Harold asked him if he had done such a thing before, because everything Harold knew about John Reese was a lot, but he had never seen or heard anything to suggest John had ever been with a man before. 

“I didn’t need written instructions the first time I was with a girl,” John told him. “This isn’t so different.”

“It’s _completely_ different,” Harold said. 

“Sure, but the mechanics of it aren’t,” John whispered back. 

If John had been doing it wrong, Harold might have argued, but he wasn’t doing anything wrong. Even if he had been doing everything wrong, Harold might not have said a word because there was a frantic sort of desperation to it that had little to do with sex. They were touching and kissing and fucking, but it wasn’t even about that. Sex was just the means, not the goal. Not that first time. The first time was a great tension-breaker and later it would seem like it had always been inevitable. No matter how it happened, they would always have found themselves there, in that bed or another, together. 

Harold wrapped his arms around John’s neck, shivered to feel his warm breath ghost along his skin, and he couldn’t stop thinking about how one more zero would have killed them both. He stroked his fingers through John’s damp hair and John rested his head on his shoulder, trying not to hold him too tight. He thought about Harold standing there on the rooftop with him after Snow’s bomb had exploded in the street. For one breathless instant, John thought it was _his_ bomb. That they had exploded. Harold could have run, but he had chosen instead to stay and die with him, and John still didn’t understand why. 

When they were done, Harold lay without moving on one side of the bed with his eyes closed, thinking. This changed everything. It _had_ to change everything. He wasn’t quite sure how yet, just that it did.

On the other side of the bed, John was sitting up with his elbows on his thighs and his head down. When Harold opened his eyes and looked at him, he could feel it like a hand moving up and down his back. It made his skin twitch with tension. He knew what Harold would be doing. Assessing the situation, of course. Then he would start to worry about John’s thoughts and his reaction to what they had just done. He would expect it to be bad. Harold thought he knew so much, and he did know a lot, but he didn’t know everything. If John was thinking about what had just happened at all, it was only because he was waiting for the other shoe to drop. 

_Any minute now…_

“Mr. Reese, I don’t think--”

John sighed, scrubbed both hands through his hair and got up to get his pants off the floor. Harold stopped talking and just sat there in the bed watching him.

“I’m not going to apologize, Harold,” John said. 

“Well… neither am I,” Harold said primly. 

John glanced around at him and raised his eyebrows. “Alright,” he said. 

“I just mean…” Harold looked away from him. “I don’t pretend to understand it, but… it might not be the worst thing in the world, ah, for both of us.”

John turned back to face him and cocked his head, studying him. “No, probably not,” he said cautiously. “What are you getting at, Harold?”

Harold blinked and looked around for his glasses. “Only that it’s happened and it can’t… _un_ happen and it probably shouldn’t have happened, Mr. Reese, but--”

“Stop calling me that,” John said. Harold glanced around nervously at the sudden coldness in his voice. “You’re naked in my bed. For Christ sake, you can call me John under the circumstances, don’t you think, Harold?”

“John then,” Harold said. He found his glasses where John had put them on the nightstand and put them on. “I’m going to make use of your bathroom before I go.” He picked up as much of his dropped clothes as he could find, then stood there looking and feeling foolish while John stared at him. “I’m sure you’d like to get some rest,” he said lamely. 

“Yeah, I could probably sleep,” John said. His gaze swept away from him back to the messy bed. 

As if released, Harold hurried across the room and disappeared into the bathroom. He was in there long enough to shower and dress, but he was still carrying some of his clothes with him when he emerged ten minutes later. He had stuffed his tie into his jacket pocket and was carrying his vest in one hand. His pocket square was lost somewhere, probably under the bed, but he didn’t go looking for it. 

“Mr. Reese…” Harold stopped and corrected himself, “John. I don’t want this to make our working arrangement awkward.”

John was laying on top of the bed with one arm over his eyes. He was resting but not yet asleep. “Our ‘working arrangement’ has always been awkward, Harold.”

“Yes, but there are boundaries,” Harold insisted. 

John lifted his arm to look at him from beneath his wrist. “It won’t happen again,” he said. 

Harold glared at him, sure that he was being deliberately obtuse. “If that’s what you want, Mr. Reese,” he said. He waited for John to object to the formal use of his name, but when he didn’t, he said, “It is entirely up to you. I simply wanted to stress how unwise it would be for it to become a distraction at work. That it is best kept… separate.”

John rolled his head on his shoulder to regard Harold in a calculating way. He smiled faintly and dropped his arm back over his eyes. “I’m not going to molest you in the book stacks, if that’s what you’re worried about.”

Harold flushed and was intensely glad that John was not looking at him when he did. “Perhaps coffee,” he said. “Or dinner?”

Instead of answering him, John said, “I’ll see you later, Harold.”

“I’ll try not to disturb you today,” Harold said, starting for the door. 

“Disturb me if you need to,” John said. 

“I’m sure Detective Fusco and Detective Carter will understand and be glad to help if I need them,” Harold said. 

Before John could insist that he disturb him rather than rely solely on the detectives, Harold bolted. It wasn’t dignified and it wasn’t graceful, but there was no other word for it. As he was feeling around in the pockets of his jacket for his phone to call a cab, Harold realized that he had stopped thinking about that zero. At some point he had just stopped thinking about it, stopped remembering the watery strain around John’s eyes and the list of numbers to choose from, the clock counting down and seven seconds between both of them and oblivion. He was still terrified and now everything, absolutely everything had changed, just shifted on its axis, but he wasn’t thinking about dying anymore at all.

††††††††

Felicity Humphrey’s husband, Stan, really was planning to kill her for the insurance money. It was a good plan, too. He might have gotten away with it completely, if not for Harold and his omniscient little adding machine. Well, Harold’s machine and the bullet Shaw threatened to use to give Stan Humphrey a hemispherectomy if he didn’t reach a less homicidal plane of existence posthaste. When Stan Humphrey tried to tell her that would be murder, Shaw just smiled and assured him that in the medical profession, it was called triage.

“I think you mean euthanasia,” John said. 

“Maybe,” Shaw said. While she thought about it, she decided to put her gun away before Stan wet himself. “So, here’s what you’re going to do, Stanley. You’re going to tell your wife that you want a divorce. If she doesn’t want to give you one, you’re _not_ going to kill her, you’re going to convince her.”

“Through non-violent means,” John added. “We don’t want to come back here,” he told Shaw. 

“No, we don’t,” Shaw said. 

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Stan said. “I love my wife. I wouldn’t kill her.” He was weeping. Not sobbing yet, but it looked like a near thing. 

They both wanted to be long gone when that started. 

“You’re not going to hire anyone to kill her, either,” Shaw added. 

“In fact, if your wife suffers so much as a suspicious paper cut, whether we want to or not, we’ll come back here,” John said. “You don’t want us to do that, do you, Stan?”

“No!” Stan wailed. “I don’t even understand what’s happening!”

“I don’t really find that hard to believe,” Shaw said. 

“I don’t know, it wasn’t a bad plan,” John said. 

“I guess not,” Shaw said. “I’d have gone another way, but I guess it wasn’t _bad_ , per se.”

“Who _are_ you people?!” Stan yelled. 

“We’re nobody. Just remember what we told you and be a good boy, Stan,” Shaw said. She turned to go and patted John’s arm as she passed him. “Come on. I’m starving. You can buy me lunch.”

“You think we should untie him first?” John asked, eying Stan with detached contemplation. 

“Yes!” Stan shouted. John had tied him to a kitchen chair in such a way that if he moved around too much or tried to stand, he would fall over on his face. “Let me go! You can’t just leave me here like this!”

Shaw shrugged and opened the front door. “Leave him. Someone will hear the racket and let him go,” she said. 

That was very possible, but the man’s wailing was getting on John’s nerves and if he didn’t shut up, he was going to alert somebody before they had a chance to leave. John reached over and hit Stan in the side of the head almost casually. Stan made a sound like an angry cat, his voice cut off mid-yowl, and his head fell forward so his chin was resting on his chest. 

“That’s better,” John said serenely.

Shaw grinned and preceded him out the door to the car. “Where’s a good place for Mexican food around here?”

They went to a little hole-in-the-wall Mexican grill for lunch and John called Carter with an “anonymous tip” about Stan Humphrey while Shaw ordered what looked like half the menu. Carter said she would look into it. She couldn’t pick Stan up for _thinking_ about murdering his wife, but she could put the fear of God into him and let him know he was being watched by more than just a creepy guy in a suit and a crazy chick with a gun. After he hung up with Carter, he called Harold to update him, but Harold was busy. 

“Good work, Mr. Reese,” he said. “I have to go now. I’ll be in touch.”

“What are you doing?” John asked. Harold had lowered his voice to just above a whisper. 

“I’m paying a visit to Miss Groves at the moment, I can’t talk,” Harold said. He hung up. 

John turned back to Shaw, who was currently digging in to a chicken quesadilla with quiet relish. “I got you a soda,” she said, pointing to the bottle of bright yellow pineapple soda in front of him. Besides the quesadilla, she had another plate of enchiladas and one with nachos in front of her. 

John forced a smile and picked up the soda. “Thanks, Shaw.”

“No problem,” she said. She ate some of her nachos and washed it down with a drink of her own orange soda. “So, what’s with Finch?”

“He’s visiting Root,” John said. He took a drink of his soda, which wasn’t that bad, just a little too sweet for his tastes, and looked around. They were sitting at a table by the windows in the back corner. He had taken the seat with his back to the wall and Shaw hadn’t tried to argue with him about it. 

“No, I mean, what’s _with_ Finch?” Shaw asked. 

John shifted his attention back to her and raised his eyebrows in question. “What do you mean?”

“Well, it’s pretty obvious he doesn’t like me,” Shaw said. “Which is fine. I get that a lot.”

“Why do you think he doesn’t like you?”

“Because I’m not an idiot and he’s not exactly subtle about it.” Shaw reached over her quesadilla plate, cut off a bite of enchilada with her fork and ate it. “Oh, come on. I’m like some stray you brought home that he lets you keep. He’s waiting for me to piss on the rug or take a bite out of the mailman.”

Amused by this mental image, John smiled. Shaw did have a point though. It wasn’t just that Harold didn’t like her, he actually seemed to almost _dis_ like her sometimes. John liked her a lot and it wasn’t impossible that was at the heart of Harold’s dislike, but Harold had never been that way about Zoe, which, considering their current personal relationship and John’s on-again-off-again fuck-buddy relationship with Zoe, would have made more sense if he was going to be jealous of anybody. Shaw seemed to antagonize him sometimes just by breathing. 

“Maybe you’re not ladylike enough for him,” John suggested. 

Shaw snorted laughter. “I think Finch is enough of a lady for both of us.” 

John grinned.

“Well, whatever,” Shaw said dismissively. She pushed her quesadilla aside and pulled the plate of enchiladas in front of her. “How are you not hungry? Shooting people always makes me hungry.”

“You haven’t shot anyone yet today,” John pointed out. 

“It’s only one o’ clock. There’s still time.”

While Shaw ate, John turned his attention back to the room. A waitress brought the couple at the table next to them their food and said something in Spanish baby talk to their little girl. The girl was about eight and seemed shy. The sun was shining brightly and it was warm for a September day in New York. Across from him, Shaw was ignoring everything she had ever learned about dining etiquette as she licked guacamole and sour cream off her middle finger. She burped and waved to the waitress for another soda. 

It was a good day. As days that came with numbers went, it was a very good day. No one had tried to kill him or Shaw yet and, unless it had happened in the last hour while he was at the hospital, no one had tried to kill Harold, either. John hadn’t even had reason all day to draw his gun, which put today at the top of a very short list of days with numbers. Sometimes, often even, they got more than one number a day, so, as Shaw had pointed out, there was still time. But right now, he was sitting in a restaurant with a friend, a bright yellow soda that tasted more like syrup than pineapple in front of him, the sun on the back of his neck and the left side of his face, and a little girl was watching him from the next table with big eyes and a soft smile. Harold would meet him for dinner later and they might have sex after and they might not. No one was cursing him or hitting him or trying to shoot him, and it might not last, but right now, in that moment, it was a good day. 

For John, some of the good days were violent days, too. Not all of his peaceful days were precious ones, sometimes they were just tedious, filled with long hours waiting for a number to come in. He had that in common with Shaw and suspected that shared affinity for violence might have a lot to do with Harold’s hostility when it came to her. In a strange way, Harold was like a parent who didn’t want his child playing with that kid at school who got into so much trouble. John wasn’t his child and he hardly needed to be encouraged or influenced to bad behavior, but the sentiment was the same. 

Harold had said, especially in the early days before Root or Shaw or Bear, that they were both already dead. It was what they had in common, it was why John didn’t have to worry or think about dying somewhere that nobody knew his name. John still wasn’t sure if that was supposed to be reassuring or frightening. Kara had called it the afterlife. This was their afterlife. It was their life after death. In his old life, there was never going to be an _after_ for him. It was why he had told Jessica not to wait for him. Because even if he had been a good little soldier, the only thing waiting for him at the end of his old life had been a black hood and a quick, anonymous death. Sometimes he still had to look around and remind himself that that wasn’t how it had happened. Shaw understood that in a way that Harold never could. How every day above ground was not always a good day. Sometimes you needed more. 

John’s phone rang and he answered it on the ear bud with a tap. It was Fusco. 

“You gonna come take this dog off my hands anytime soon, or what? I got work to do. I can’t be babysitting Fido here all damn day.”

“Finch left Bear with you?” John asked. 

“Yeah. Said something about no dogs being allowed wherever the hell he was off to. You were supposed to pick him up half an hour ago,” Fusco said. 

Harold had predicted about how long it would take Shaw and John to deal with Stan Humphrey with remarkable accuracy. To Fusco, John said, “I’m sure you can handle one very well-behaved dog for a few hours, Lionel.”

“Hey, I’m not a dog walker,” Fusco said. “You gonna come get him or not?”

Shaw was about done eating anyway and John didn’t have anywhere else to be at the moment. “Sure Lionel. I’ll be there in about a hour. Take a coffee break and bring him out to me.”

“That wasn’t another number,” Shaw said after he hung up. She was wiping her fingers on a paper napkin. “What’s up?”

“Finch left Bear with Fusco. I have to go get him,” John said. He put two twenties on the table and stood up. “Should I drop you somewhere?”

“It’s cool. It’s a good day for a walk anyway,” Shaw said. She drank the last of her soda and put it with her plates on the side of the table. “I might get dessert.”

John gave her an incredulous look. 

“What?” Shaw said.

“Nothing. Just wondering where you put it all,” John said. 

“You calling me fat, Reese?” she demanded. 

“No,” John said. “Quite the opposite, actually. See you later, Shaw.”

He left and Shaw turned her attention to the dessert menu.

††††††††

Harold hated hospitals. Even hospitals for the mentally ill, with no one coughing in the waiting room or spreading infection down the hallways, made him uneasy. But since he couldn’t really trust either John or Shaw with Root, and he would prefer it if they didn’t kill her, he had to go himself.

They made Harold wait about thirty minutes because Root was with her doctor. An orderly brought her out to him when she finished and stood nearby, just out of hearing. 

“Uncle Harold,” Root said. She smiled at the absurdity of it and sat down in the chair across from him. 

She didn’t look well and Harold wondered if she was eating. Hunger strike didn’t seem like something she would do, she was too smart for such things, but maybe she was depressed. He could understand it if she was. He had only been in the hospital half an hour and it was already getting to him. 

“I brought you some things,” Harold said. He put a brightly colored gift bag on the table between them. When she didn’t take it and just continued to stare at him with her wide, mad eyes, he shifted anxiously in his seat and cleared his throat. “How are you, Miss Groves?”

Root tilted her head to one side in a curious, avian way. “What do you want, Harold?”

“To see how you’re doing,” Harold said. 

She smiled and sat forward to peer into the gift bag at what he had brought her. Inside was a new set of pajamas, a cashmere cardigan, lip balm, a bottle of black nail polish, two books of word and number puzzles and an iPod. “What kind of music did you put on this?”

“Well… I don’t know your preferences, so I didn’t put any music on it. There are a few books in audio that I thought you might enjoy,” Harold said. “If you want, I can bring you some music next time. I would just need to know--”

“Next time?” Root asked. She put the things back into the bag and steepled her fingers in front of her mouth. “Why are you really here, Harold?”

“Miss Groves, the machine gave me a number this morning,” he said. 

“Not _my_ number,” Root said confidently. “She would have told me about that.”

“No, not your number,” Harold said. “I’ve received this number once before, shortly after you were brought here. Are you planning to kill your doctor, Miss Groves?”

“Call me Root, Harold. How many times do I have to tell you?” She shifted forward in her seat and lowered her voice. “I’m still thinking about it. We’re discussing it. _Debating_ it. I’ll tell you something though, Harold, I really _want_ to kill him. He’s an arrogant, stupid, sanctimonious, vile little man. But… _but_ She doesn’t want me to kill him. She wants me to let him help me. Can you imagine? _Him_ help _me_?”

Harold thought it unlikely, but that was no fault of the doctor’s and no reason to allow the woman to murder him. “Why do you call it ‘she’, Miss Groves?”

“Because, Harold, ‘it’ seems so disrespectful, don’t you think?” she said. “I’ve always liked the idea of God being a woman.”

“The machine isn’t God,” Harold said. 

“No. Unlike God, the machine exists… somewhere,” Root said. 

“I can’t let you kill your doctor,” Harold said. 

“You can’t really stop me.”

Harold stared at her flatly for a minute without speaking. Finally he said, “I can have you transferred. Or I’ll have you sent to a different doctor.”

“That’s really not up to you,” Root said. “I think I have to stay here, Harold. She wants me to stay here. It’s a test.”

“A test for what?”

“A test to see… if I can be saved. If I can function the way you do, without getting my hands dirty. I have certain very valuable skills and She wants to repurpose me. I’m being recycled, Harold, and I’m not sure if I like it.”

There was a strained note of insane hysteria to her voice that Harold found alarming. _Recycled_? What a strange and somehow monstrous way to put it. He didn’t know exactly what the machine had planned for her, but if it really was talking to her, and he had no reason to think that it wasn’t, maybe he should wait and see.

“Alright, suppose the machine _is_ testing you and it wants you to stay here and keep seeing the same doctor,” Harold said. “What do you think it means that it sent me his number?”

“Oh, well… If I had to guess, I would say it means I’m failing the test,” Root said. A miserable, weary expression crossed her face and she sighed. “The thing is… She wants to branch out. She sees so much, but you and John and that woman… New York is just one city. One city in one state in one very small part of a very big country where people murder each other all the time.”

“Are you trying to say the machine wants to _franchise_?” Harold asked. 

Root laughed. “Yes, I think so.”

He supposed it did make sense. The machine saw everything, not just everything in New York or up and down the east coast, _everything_. Harold, John and now Shaw, with the help of the two detectives were just enough to handle the irrelevant list here, but that left thousands of miles, millions of acres and hundreds of millions of people without anyone like them to save them. Chicago, Boston, Miami, New Orleans, Dallas, Seattle, Los Angeles… there were hundreds of cities with crime as bad or worse than the crime in New York. And Root did have some very valuable skills, but Harold didn’t share the machine’s optimism about her potential redemption and repurposing. She was damaged, but not the way John had been damaged. The places where she had cracked had stripped her of much of her humanity and nearly all of her respect for human life.

“You can’t kill him,” Harold said again. “I don’t care what kind of game you’re playing with the machine or what it wants from you. I won’t let you kill him. I will have you put somewhere else before I do that, somewhere you won’t be able to hurt anybody, and Miss Groves, if you do kill him, I will put you somewhere… _bury_ you somewhere you’ll not only never see the light of day again, but not even the machine will be able to reach you.”

Root stared at him fixedly for a long time, her pale skin going sickly white. “You wouldn’t,” she whispered. “You _can’t_. She would never let you do that.”

Harold stood and buttoned his jacket. “You can call it whatever you want and worship it if it makes you feel better, but your god? It’s a machine and _I_ built it. I can,” he said. “I hope you enjoy your presents. I have to meet someone, so I’ve got to be going. Have a good evening, Miss Groves.”

“You can’t,” was all Root said as he left. “You can’t do that! She chose _me_ , Harold! You can’t!” she screamed after him.

††††††††

Harold stood watching John under a tree that’s leaves had turned red, yellow and bronze and were floating in drifts all around him. John threw a tennis ball for Bear and walked along after him as the dog raced to get it. He knew Harold was there and watching him and started to angle in his direction to meet him.

Bear caught the ball and looked around to find John, then bolted after him, his long legs flying in a way that reminded Harold of those lawn ornaments with the wind propellers. They were usually shaped like ducks or dragonflies or Indians in a canoe, but he could easily imagine one that looked like Bear did when he ran. Beside him, John was like a wild cat, calm and alert and full of potential energy and violence. He moved slowly as he walked toward Harold, but he could move suddenly and quickly and even when he was strolling lazily along, it was a wonder that no one seemed to sense it. 

“Hey, Harold,” John said as he reached him. He stood under the tree with him and watched Bear rushing toward them. 

Bear dropped the ball when he got to them without being told and pranced backward eagerly when John picked it up. John threw it and Bear tore out after it again. 

“How long have you been here?” Harold asked him.

“I don’t know. A couple hours,” John said. 

“Doesn’t he ever get tired?”

John shrugged. “Not yet.”

“Don’t _you_?”

John smirked and glanced down at him. “Not really.”

Suspecting some kind of implied double entendre, Harold narrowed his eyes. 

John’s expression remained neutral.

“It’s been a strange day,” Harold finally said. 

“Has it?” John asked. 

Bear came running back to them through the leaves and slid to a stop at John’s feet, his tongue hanging out the side of his mouth around the tennis ball. John took the ball and clipped Bear’s leash back on. He passed the leash to Harold when he stood. 

“I’ll tell you all about it at dinner,” Harold said as they started to walk. “Miss Groves may yet prove to be a problem.”

**XXX**

**Author's Note:**

> There's now a sequel by Portrait_of_a_Fool called [The Grit from Stars](http://archiveofourown.org/works/1013645).


End file.
